Profitable Brilliance is written by Bruce Rogers and Russ Prince on the topic of how to make your company a thought leader. Bruce is the Chief Insights Officer for Forbes Media and Russ Prince is the President of Prince Associates. They are the co-authors of the book "Profitable Brillance: How Professional Services Firms Become Thought Leaders" available on Amazon http://amzn.to/PnkUnB

How to Dramatically Grow an Association's Membership and Sponsorships

Associations provide certain benefits – explicitly (e.g., lobbying efforts) or implicitly (e.g., informal networking) – to their members. Generally, the ability of an association to grow its membership is a function of the perceived value it can deliver. By bringing the membership greater value the association is positioned to attract new members while maintaining existing ones, which consequently enables the association to deliver even greater value. It’s a virtuous cycle– or at least should be.

To a large degree, when an association grows its membership it’s able to generate meaningful revenues that can be applied to benefiting the members. These revenues usually come from two sources.

One source is the members. There are the fees they pay to be part of the association. The more members an association has, the more fees it collects. Furthermore, in many associations, the members will regularly provide additional financial support, which comes in a wide variety of forms such as contributions to a foundation as well as the services and products they purchase from the association.

The second source of revenues is sponsorships. Sponsors pay to support the association’s initiatives and events in order to access the membership on a preferential basis. Sponsorship support should be a major revenue generator for most associations. The ability of the association to develop meaningful opportunities for sponsors will regularly translate into the ability to bring in different sponsors for different projects as well as get “top dollar.” While some associations are being very creative in identifying and developing meaningful sponsorship opportunities, quite a few are limiting themselves to the more traditional offerings such as their events.

With the goal of growing the membership, coupled with generating new sponsorship opportunities, associations would be well served to consider their own thought leadership campaigns. The objectives of any association’s thought leadership campaign should be to:

(1) Provide actionable insights and perspectives that can make the members more successful.

(2) Bring in new members who want to be more successful.

(3) Permit the association to get “top dollar” from sponsors.

The result of the thought leadership campaign will result in members being more excited about being a member. It will also be a big factor in growing the membership. Furthermore, the thought leadership campaign will add consequential monies to the association’s coffers.

There are a number of ways for an association to structure and implement a thought leadership campaign. For example, identifying best practices among its members can prove extremely useful. By taking such an approach the association becomes recognized as a core source for cutting-edge understandings that members can use to become more successful. There are quite a number of other ways to for an association to be recognized as a thought leader, which is a function of the nature of the membership, the resources that can be accessed and ingenuity of the association. Before any approach to becoming a thought leader is taken, it’s important that the association think through how to achieve the objectives noted above.

Often critical to conceptualizing and implementing a thought leadership campaign that can generate the exceptional results we’re discussing is cost. Such initiatives tend not to be inexpensive. Innovative associations are dealing with the costs of delivering a cutting-edge thought leadership campaign through higher-level sponsorships.

Associations’ being thought leaders is not a new concept. Nevertheless, it’s not being capitalized anywhere to the extent it can be. We anticipate this to change dramatically over the next few years due to an increasingly hyper-competitive and difficult economic environment.

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